Wednesday, January 15, 2014

b&w stories: 6 word memoir

young girl with a mother's heart

that's my dad up on the pony and my aunt nada holding him steady. he said she was always a little mama and he was definitely a fat baby (which he outgrew and became a quite skinny kid). the photo was taken in about 1932 and he was in the 18 month range. i asked him who the pony belonged to, and he said people just brought them around town with cameras from time to time, peddling pony pics. that's kinda what i thought. i find it interesting. life is so different now with even our tweens sporting iphones in their back pockets. can you imagine a world where photos were a rarity?

dad said they lived in town till he was about two (and then they moved way out in the country). the "town" was economy, indiana and sported about 100 people. that's quite a population boom! he said the town started out in the creek valley, but there were too many mosquitos down there and thus too much malaria. they moved it up on the hill and renamed it economy, because it saved them money (seems like it saved them lives!). and once again, my dad casually imparts knowledge. i guess i never realized that we even had malaria in the united states. it seems like such a foreign plague. but yes, it was indeed a problem here prior to the 1950's. in 1947, the CDC began a concerted effort to eliminate the disease in the u.s. and by 1949, "the country was declared free of malaria as a significant public health problem."

this post is part of a series on my efforts to get my dad's black and white photo history documented.

i've also used it for this weeks contribution to the 6 word memoir january photo challenge at get it scrapped!